About

Whenever we meet – in a tea house in Munich for a cup of tea or for a stroll
in the streets of a small Italian town – the subject of beauty, of a work of
music or sculpture or architecture always comes up, not because we want
to have "smart conversations", but because Anja Lechner has endless
questions and ideas in her on these matters. It is as if she has an
inexhaustible urge to get acquainted with values still unknown yesterday
to herself and many of her friends, to make them hers, and especially to
bring them into her performance world.

Anja is her cello's faithful friend. And it seems to me that her ever-growing
knowledge and life experience are amassed solely to be dedicated to her
cello.

During her visit to Armenia, as we walked in the mountains and visited
ancient churches breathing in nature, I looked at the landscape and the
monasteries through her eyes too. And at that moment, both the church
and Anja herself were truly very beautiful.

When she plays my music, of course, I hear the "lessons" she has learned
from the nature of Armenia, from its churches, as well as from the phonetics
and prosody of the Armenian language.

At each one of her concerts, I hear how she creates means for her rich
emotional world to render her performance not only beautiful, but also
authentic. This is how Saluzzi's world becomes hers, how she
makes her own the musical realities of Tarkovsky, Gurdjieff, Silvestrov and
other works that do not yet have a solid tradition of performance.

Anja Lechner's cello is an open window welcoming all pure sounds of music
coming from all corners of the world.